Some people seem to have it all: the perfect love life, the perfect career, the perfect social life, the perfect financial situation, and all that without working particularly hard. They always look happy and full of energy. Others seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders. Everything always seems to go wrong in their life. They look unhappy and are often depressed.
We mostly attribute this phenomenon to the fact that some people are born under a good star, while others are not. By saying such a thing, we decide that luck comes from an external force and that it is, in fact, something we have no control over.
Richard Wiseman, a professor at Britain's University of Hertfordshire, got interested in the concept of luck and decided to conduct a study that lasted 10 years with a group of 400 exceptionally lucky and unlucky people from all walks of life. In a book called Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind, Wiseman shares his findings.
In one experiment, all the participants bought a lottery ticket. As he had expected, lucky and unlucky people lost in equal percentages, because lotteries are based on random chance. However, in another study he conducted, Wiseman asked his participants to count the photographs in a sample newspaper. Far more self-proclaimed lucky people noticed on page 2, written in big letters and disguised as an advertisement, the words STOP COUNTING: THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.
After conducting several experiments, Dr. Wiseman concluded that lucky people simply possessed four basic psychological traits, which unlucky people didn’t seem to have:
They had the ability to maximize chance opportunities.
They listened to their “gut feelings”.
They expected good fortune.
They saw the bright side of bad luck.
Wiseman believes that luck is not some kind of outside force. It is largely created by a psychological disposition and character traits. He found that lucky people were usually extraverted, sociable, optimist, open-minded and didn’t suffer from anxiety.
I’ve noticed in my life, that when I am in a good mental state, good things happen to me. The opposite is also true: when I’m not feeling so great, my day seems to continuously be going wrong.
If Wiseman is right though, working on leading a happier life, being more optimistic, sociable, open-minded and less anxious could increase your luck. Destiny might not be all written after all. And, a self-proclaimed unlucky person, with the knowledge of that study, might now have some tools to turn things around.
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